Chapter 102 One sentence repeated and revised one hundred and four times

One of the basic elements of embellishing language is to try to express your meaning with precision and delicacy, even in the most subtle points of thought.It is not easy to do this, even for those writers who are trained. Fanny Hirst once told me that sometimes she wrote sentences that had to be revised fifty to a hundred times.Once she made a statistic, and it turned out that she revised a sentence a total of 104 times.Mabel Herbert Earner also told me that she would often spend an afternoon editing short stories that were about to be published in several newspapers simultaneously.The result of repeated deletions and revisions is often just to remove one or two sentences.And Morris's story about Richard Harding Davis's strict words is even more thought-provoking.

Every word in his novels is determined after rigorous screening among numerous vocabularies.Not only words, paragraphs, and chapters are changed and changed, but even the entire storyline has to be brewed and revised several times. He advocates this strict selection of writing principles, for example, he wants to describe the scene of a car driving into the gate.First of all, he will describe the scenes he can see in detail without losing any details.Then, he began to try to delete the irrelevant details, which was very painful.Because every time he deletes a part, he will ask himself, "Is that scene complete?" If the scene has any shortcomings, he will restore the deleted part, and then try to delete other parts, and so on. Can provide readers with a concise and complete picture.

It is precisely because Richard Harding Davis strictly follows such a writing rule that his language has enduring charm.But most of us can't do that with Davis.One is that there is no time, and the other is that there is no patience.And the reason why I give these examples is just to let everyone understand that all successful writers attach great importance to the accuracy of language expression.Recognizing this may stimulate everyone's interest in practicing English.Of course, for an orator, he cannot hesitate for a long time on the podium in order to find a word that can properly express his ideas, but he must pay attention to the cultivation of the accuracy of language expression in daily conversations And exercise, make it a subconscious behavior and quality, "ten minutes on stage, ten years off stage" is the truth.

It is said that Milton mastered 8,000 words, and Shakespeare 15,000.A standard dictionary can cover about 50,000 words, but according to general estimates, an ordinary person can only master about 2,000 words. Coupled with the usual thinking inertia of ordinary people, he is not willing to cultivate Precise language expression is exhausting. He simply used some conjunctions to connect verbs, nouns, and adjectives, and they became sentences in his mouth and articles in his pen. Of course, the result was terrible. Here is an example for everyone. I once spent a wonderful and unforgettable time in the stunning Grand Canyon in Colorado, western United States.But one afternoon I heard a woman describe the loveliness of a Chinese dog, the beauty of an orchard, the gentleness of a man, and the grandeur of the Grand Canyon, all using the same adjective "beautiful" beautiful)", which somewhat put me off.In fact, there are many words that can be used to express "beautiful". She can use synonyms of this word to make her language beautiful.

Rory once made a list of as many as seventy synonyms for the word "beautiful".I won't go into details here.Rory once wrote a book "Glossary of the Same Kind", in which more than 70 synonyms of "beautiful" mentioned above can be found. Personally, this book has been a huge help to me.As I was writing, this book was always with me.And I use it ten times more often than I use dictionaries.This "Glossary of the Same Kind" is the crystallization of Rory's painstaking efforts for decades, and it will be of extraordinary significance to you. Of course, you can't put it on the shelf, and its value will only be revealed if you read it frequently and use it frequently.Use it often, and your language charm will grow day by day.